A man in an immaculate Italian suit stands in the lobby of a crumbling Seoul building, looking at the cracked tile and the bickering tenants the way most people look at a wine list. He has just flown in from Milan, he is technically a Mafia consigliere, and there is a fortune in gold bars sealed in concrete somewhere beneath his feet. That is the opening register of Vincenzo (빈센조), and the show never quite lets go of it: lethal one moment, broadly silly the next, always dressed impeccably for both.
The premise
Vincenzo Cassano, born Park Joo-hyung, was adopted from Korea as a child and raised in Italy, where he rose to become the consigliere of a Mafia family. When his organization is destabilized, he returns to Seoul and checks into the run-down Geumga Plaza, beneath which a secret hoard of gold is hidden. What he expects to be a quiet retrieval job turns into a war: the plaza and the people in it are caught in the path of the corrupt Babel conglomerate, a machine of crooked executives and bought lawyers that the ordinary law cannot touch. So Vincenzo stops trying to use the law. Allied with the sharp-tongued lawyer Hong Cha-young, he answers Babel’s villainy with Mafia-honed cunning, fighting evil with evil.
The tone is the real signature here: this is a dark, even black, comedy welded to a crime-revenge thriller, with a thread of romance running through it. One scene plays like a gangster execution; the next plays like a sitcom about a building full of misfits — a dry cleaner, a pawnshop owner, a temple of monks, a small-time band of tenants who can barely keep the lights on. It should not hold together, and the pleasure of the show is that it does. The structure is built for the long game: rather than racing toward one confrontation, the series stacks scheme on counter-scheme across 20 episodes, letting Vincenzo and his unlikely allies dismantle Babel piece by piece. The violence is stylized and often cartoonish, the comedy is broad, and the menace underneath is real — and the show keeps all three in the air at once.
Where to watch
Vincenzo aired on tvN from February 20 to May 2, 2021, and streams worldwide on Netflix. It runs 20 episodes as a single complete season, with no second season to wait on or catch up to. If you want a self-contained binge with a real ending, the run is finished and the whole thing is in one place. As a tvN production carried globally by Netflix, it’s also one of the more accessible entry points into the streamer’s deep bench of Korean crime drama.
The cast
Song Joong-ki plays Vincenzo Cassano (Park Joo-hyung), the consigliere whose cold competence keeps cracking to reveal something more human underneath. Jeon Yeo-been is Hong Cha-young, the fast-talking lawyer who starts as an opponent and becomes the show’s other engine; her motormouth courtroom energy is one of the series’ breakout pleasures. Ok Taec-yeon, of the group 2PM, plays Jang Jun-woo / Jang Han-seok, in a much-discussed turn that trades on the audience’s assumptions about who the real threat is. Kim Yeo-jin plays the formidable lawyer Choi Myung-hee, Babel’s coldly capable legal weapon, and Kwak Dong-yeon plays Jang Han-seo. The series was directed by Kim Hee-won and written by Park Jae-bum, whose script is the reason the wild tonal shifts feel deliberate rather than accidental.
Filming locations
Be warned if you are planning a visit: “Geumga Plaza,” the heart of the show, is a constructed and dressed set rather than a real public landmark you can walk into. The Italy-set scenes are also not the postcard tour they look like. Production fell during the COVID-19 pandemic, so the Italian sequences were largely shot in Korea and augmented with CGI rather than filmed on location in Milan. The look is convincing, but it is built, not found.
Worth your time?
Watch it if you want a genre mash-up few K-dramas even attempt: a Mafia thriller, a courtroom drama, and broad slapstick sharing one body, anchored by Song Joong-ki playing hard against his clean-cut romantic-lead image. The real heart, and the reason people rewatch, is the way the misfit Geumga Plaza tenants harden from a squabbling crowd into a found-family resistance — the show is at its best when it lets these small, overlooked people become dangerous together. Jeon Yeo-been’s Hong Cha-young is the other reason to stay, turning what could have been a stock sidekick into a co-lead, and Ok Taecyeon’s much-cited villain reveal gives the back half a jolt.
Skip it if tonal whiplash bothers you, if you want your crime drama played entirely straight, or if cartoonish violence and broad comedy sitting next to genuine menace strikes you as too much. At 20 episodes it asks for a real commitment, and the comedy can swing very broad before the next gut-punch lands. But this is a show with a high ceiling and a wide swing; if the swing connects for you, little else feels quite like it.
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